<p>Damian Wielgosik has created Drawter, a web based tool to layout pages:

Drawter is a tool written in JavaScript and based on jQuery library. It provides you the possibility to literally draw your website’s code. It runs on every single web-browser which makes it really useful and helpful. Each tag is presented as a layer you have drawn.

Currently Drawter is available in Pro version, which means that it is intended for webmasters use only – knowledge of HTML and CSS is required.

Drawter is not a tool for laymen, for the time being, but the whole team behind the project is putting every effort to launch a new version called “Amateur”. Soon you will be able to draw your websites without any knowledge of HTML or CSS. Launching soon, really soon.

He has a detailed screencast of the tool in action where you see how you can flip between draw and edit modes to build up your page. Nicely done!

Actually, frenchStudent, HTML was never intended to be coded by humans.

I never intended HTML source code (the stuff with the angle brackets) to be seen by users. A browser/editor would let a user simply view or edit the language of a page of hypertext, as if he were using a word processor. The idea of asking people to write the angle brackets by hand was to me, and I assumed to many, as unacceptable as asking one to prepare a Microsoft Word document by writing out its binary coded format.

things change.. the WWW was also just intended to link particle physics papers together with hypertext. a simple document with links would be easy to be all WYSIWIG but I hardly imagine Tim imagined HTML being used in the ways it now is.
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He didn’t invent CSS or advanced layouts. He set up a great base which all sorts of developers/designers have pushed the limits of his ideas.
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Point being, I don’t think that the quote justifies WYSIWYG’s, it just shows that his original vision was limited. He seems to be speaking about the average person who wants to publish hypertext data, not developers creating complex layouts.

I’m about 95% of the way through developing our visual website builder, and it’s definitely a time-saver, so I would say that with the right system there’s a real use for this kind of tool. The fact that we can visually design standards-based, search-engine optimized, XHTML/CSS pages and turn our customer’s sites over in a few hours, plus leave them with a system that they can maintain afterwards, is a real benefit.